Education For Employment (EFE) is the leading nonprofit that trains youth and links them to jobs across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). This pivotal region is the hardest place on the planet for youth to get their first job – they are three times more likely to be unemployed than older adults.
EFE is interested in the effectiveness of their programs, particularly whether graduates find stable employment. We have data on about 7,000 participants in almost 500 program cohorts spread across 8 countries. Participants bring diverse skills, interests, and backgrounds. Programs employ a variety of training models and placement policies. How well are different programs working, and for whom?
EFE has an Salesforce database that houses all information about the organization’s programs, participants, and job placement and retention outcomes. The datasets used in this project include:
Initially, the data exports from Salesforce were pre-processed in the following ways:
The preprocessing script can be viewed on GitHub so that the deidentification steps can be reproduced with new data exports.
The contact dataset contains 8 columns that relate to when each participant obtained employment. These can be collapsed into a single column that gives the time it took for the participant to get placed, or that they were not placed or could not be reached. Below, the new composite column is on the right, and the original job placement columns can be removed.
Job retention at 6 months is the initial outcome variable in the analysis. Therefore, if the participant can not be reached at 6 months after job placement, they are filtered out, unless they had already not retained their job at the 3 month employment status check. Of the 7124 participants in the data, only 3162 were able to be reached for the 6 month employment survey, or were already known to have not retained their job at 3 months. This is the set of participants that will be included in the analysis.
Overall, of the 3162 participants there is data for, 48.8% had retained employment 6 months after being placed in a job (1431 of 2932).
The analysis is initially interested in retention at 6 months; therefore the employment status check data will be filtered to contain only the 6 month surveys, and those survey responses can be joined to the participant contact information retaining a 1:1 relationship.
The pre and post training surveys contain questions around confidence and self-efficacy that EFE is interested in looking into. There are five different questions relating to confidence, with answers on a “not at all confident” to “very confident” scale. These answers are turned into numbers so that a composite index can be created, and so that changes in confidence after participants have been through the training programs can be more easily measured.
The plots below utilize the composite confidence and self-efficacy scores to show overall changes between pre and post surveys.
A series of models will be tested to determine whether there are features that are important in whether or not participants retained the job the were placed in after 6 months.